Can I monitor a host without defining any services for it?

[Ian Masters]

Hello

I was wondering about the necessity to define a service for hosts that I
just want to ping. As far as I understand, the default Host Check
Command, check-host-alive, is a ping check and looking at my scheduling
queue, these checks are being done regularly but when I verify my config
files Nagios always warns me about the hosts which have no services defined.

So I looked in the documentation and found this:
http://www.nagios.org/faqs/viewfaq.php?faq_id=39

On that page Ethan Galstad says:
You really need to define at least one server per host that you plan on
monitoring. Although you can define a host and not assign any services
to it, you will not get the results you are expecting. Nagios is
primarily geared towards monitoring services - hosts are only checked
when there are problems or recoveries with services, so things will go
awry if you define a host without any services.

The above FAQ was written in 2002. Is this still true?

Since the host is already being checked by the Host Check Command, it
seems redundant to specify a ping check as a service.

Do all you Nagios admins define a ping service, if you only want to
check if a host is up or down?

Thanks

Ian Masters

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